Vacuum Engineering Services Ltd,
St. Modwen Road, Stretford,
Manchester, M32 0ZE
Other Offices:
& training standard parts
& accessories protecting
the environment
Helium Leak Testing
Tightening environmental standards together with increasing functional and safety requirements drive manufacturers to guarantee leak tightness by completing 100% leak testing as part of the production process.
Vacuum Engineering offer a range of helium leak test solutions to select the optimum technique to meet our customer's helium leak testing needs.
We specialise in helium leak testing, which provides an ideal solution - giving a very sensitive and quantifiable test, which is reliable and suited to integration into the manufacturing process.
The test checks every leak point by enclosing the product in a vacuum chamber. The air from around the outside is evacuated and helium gas is introduced inside the product. A highly sensitive mass spectrometer detects the presence of helium on the outside which would indicate a leak. This technology has the sensitivity to detect leaks which other traditional methods such as pressure decay will not find. To put this into context, industrial helium leak test machines can detect the equivalent of one tiny bubble every hour, that's the same as a car tyre going flat over 2500 years!
Vacuum Engineering’s design, and development work together with the experience of making more than 500 systems ensures this highly sensitive and technical technique is also robust and able to work reliably as part of a production line which has to perform 24 hours a day, 7 days a week to provide high throughput manufacture.
Helium Leak Testing - why use helium for leak detection?
There are many benefits to using helium as a leak test method:
- Helium is the smallest atom (after hydrogen) so easily reaches the parts other atoms can't reach!
- Helium is present in the atmosphere in sufficiently low quantities so as not to affect testing
- Helium is inert, so safe to use for testing. Unlike other tracer gases, residual helium left in the component will not react with any gas/liquid which the component is charged with in it's normal operation
- Helium has a unique mass number (4) enabling mass spectrometers to be 'tuned' to only see helium
- Helium costs are relatively low - in high consumption processes helium recovery units can be used to obtain high recovery rates
- Helium is naturally occurring in the atmosphere and can be safely discharged without any adverse environmental effects
Helium Leak Test Applications
- From manual to fully automated solutions
- Production rates to suit your needs [our fastest is 100 parts per minute!]
- Leak rates as low as 1.0 E-7 mbar.l/s
- Test Pressure to suit your needs
- Programming Software – to suit your needs
- Typical PLC/PAC types:
- Rockwell/Allen-Bradley
- Siemens
- Mitsubishi
- Omron
- Toshiba
- Wonderware/In-Touch
Identifying 'good' components:
- Barcode reading/printing
- engraving
- pin-dot marking
- label-printing
- data acquisition
- data-storage
Cost savings for manufacturers
- Environmental Liability
- Warranty Costs
- Product Recall costs
- Product Safety & Liability costs
- Demonstrating Due-Diligence
- Conforming to Legislation
Helium testing for safety
- For containing hazardous substances
- BNFL
- gas meters
- hydrocarbon refrigerators
- Environment
- Fuel Systems leak hydrocarbons which cause climate change
- Refrigerant emissions damage ozone layer
